It is no more valid to judge Gravity´s Rainbow on the accuracy of its predictions than it is to rate Orwell on how close he came to describing the real 1984, but from the perspective of the present there are a number of startlingly proleptic moments in there. A German engineer in the Zone foresees the mass commodification of guilt: "Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves." This is exceptional, as is Pynchon´s drilling down into the history of such German concerns as IG Farben and their scummy wartime activities—and the disturbing connections they had to American business. Even more exceptional is the book´s prefiguring of a digital world and an information-based economy. Here, after all, is a book obsessed with the human tendency to reduce all phenomena to "the zero and the one." Uh-huh. In Zurich, a Russian black marketeer complains to a Slothrop in search of information, "Is it any wonder the world´s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?" and predicts, "Someday it´ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future." Quite true—the hypersurveillance of Slothrop´s precognitive erections and all else anticipates our lives today, every keystroke noted by spyware, every transaction transmitted to a data bank. Slothrop´s ego decay and psychic dispersal can easily be regarded as all our eventual fates in the real kingdom of the zero and the one.